Germany’s next Culture Minister will be Green

V.Lind says:

I agree with most of your argument, though I am not entirely persuaded by your opening. I doubt most of today’s young would have a clue what romanticism is.

I think it is a result of things being spoon-fed to them, for which I find the most pernicious influence, much as I am a devotee of its greatest doings, is television. (Radio, even commercial radio, requires a little more give-back from audiences). And on the whole I suspect the parenting skills of the post-60s generation will not top God’s league tables of best parenting.

As for teaching — I remember Hacker in Yes, Minister thinking of conscription as a solution to youth unemployment: “and they’ll give them a progressive education to make up for their progressive education.”

The ultimate result is laziness — reading older books, listening to serious music, even watching an intelligent movie, require EFFORT, a word indolents of all generations resist. I am convinced minds have atrophied after years of their parents fighting all their battles for them at school, of watered-down education demands, of years of being parked in front of cartoons and mindless sitcoms with laugh tracks to tell them what’s funny, leading to movie tastes that seem to be based upon studios plumbing the depths of a comic-book universe for subjects and the sequels ad nauseam so they don’t have to respond to anything they didn’t know before from their own limited lives.

These are music’s audiences — which is bad enough. But, even worse, they are its creators — creators with no interest in the history of their craft, or even the tools of it. It’s the same in too much of today’s writing. I met a young man writing a novel, who asked me if I liked a particular body of literature. I said I did not, because it had no reference — acknowledging that there were some fine exemplars of good writing within it, but that I felt even there no connection to the wider world of literature.

I do not despise modernity — where would be be if the Impressionists had not taken their own look at the world around them, or Debussy and Ravel had not? Or Elvis Presley, for that matter. If John Osborne and his contemporaries had not taken postwar British drama and literature out of the drawing room and into the kitchen, out of the Home Counties and into the North, on a West End Stage?

But they, and Presley and the Beatles and a good few that came after them, were still schooled in a world beyond their front door. They moved their disciplines, but did not deny that they were part of one. They were rebels, and innovators.

|for me it usually boils down to two word: they read. Those words don’t carry much weight with a generation whose canvas is a portable screen where they can “connect” to uncurated (in its best and original sense) and sub-literate communications in the form of text. We have really saddled the world with a population who literally need to be introduced to the “readin’, writin’, arithmetic” skills our generation and those before us took for granted. They cannot read beyond “U R Gr8”, they cannot write anything beyond their signature, except maybe a tweet — and for that they depend upon spellcheck — and for sums they whip out the calculator “function.” And they are already in government, determining where public money will be spent. With “ideas” fomented by Twitterati and BTL commentary.

I like the Greens, in general, because they have been among those striving to improve the world in order to save it. But I find their focus on important issues has made them all too malleable to pressure groups formed by the ignorant, when they step outside their own natural remit. Let’s keep an eye on this Minister. We are used to a strong and intelligent leadership from Germany, so her decisions may cross borders all too fast.